In last 6 months Google has been quietly buying key robotics companies and has since then bought 8 of them. Their latest and crown acquisition for this year - cutting edge robotic company Boston Dynamics - was announced on Friday, December 13.

Google's robotic effort is being led by well known Andy Rubin, the man which led smartphone operating system Android into global dominance.

Mr Rubin tweeted on Friday "The future is looking awesome!" and linked to the New York Times article, which first reported the acquisition. A Google spokesperson confirmed the deal but declined to elaborate on its price or plans.

As with any business project at this level, nobody really knows what exactly are they up to (except Google obviously), but if we follow simple economics and opportunities in the field of robotics it seems the next decades will be all about robots.

Boston Dynamics is a company that builds advanced robots with remarkable behavior: mobility, agility, dexterity and speed. In their own words they "use sensor-based controls and computation to unlock the capabilities of complex mechanisms. Our world-class development teams take projects from initial concept to proof-of-principle prototyping to build-test-build engineering, to field testing and low-rate production."

Organizations worldwide turn to Boston Dynamics for advice and help in creating the most advanced robots on Earth and Google now has their know-how under its hood.

After Amazon announced their drone package delivery project, news of their hard working warehouse employees started coming out. It appears they have their hands and legs on tight schedule doing boring and near impossible tasks that should be done by robots.

There is a growing list of what robots will be doing in the future, and that list is just one answer to question why is Google investing in this... the robots will end up doing all the tasks humans are not fit for. This includes automated car driving (in this case the car is the robot), mining, surveillance, space exploration and other dangerous tasks... See more in BBC documentary named How Robots Will Change the World.

This inevitably leads us to the problem of skyrocketing global unemployment rates. The Swiss showed us the solution with their referendum on basic income for every adult. Since we are already working just for numbers on our bank accounts it is time for our governments to share those ones and zeroes with us, and in a way that does not insult us as conscious living beings.

You already know about transhumanism and Ray Kurzweil who argues that it is possible to create consciousness in an artificial being, but did you know that as of 2012 he is also working for Google? Last year, Kurzweil was appointed as Director of Engineering at Google and in an interview for Wired in April 2013, he explained: "My mission at Google is to develop natural language understanding with a team and in collaboration with other researchers at Google. Search has moved beyond just finding keywords, but it still doesn’t read all these billions of web pages and book pages for semantic content. ... We’d like the computers to actually pick up on that semantic meaning. If that happens, and I believe that it’s feasible, people could ask more complex questions."

Latest articles

ESA's Solar Orbiter spacecraft passed through the ion tail of Comet C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS) on May 31 and June 1, 2020, and through its dust tail on June 6. This is the 7th space mission to fly through the tail of a comet, and the first one whose upcoming crossing was...

The center of Tropical Storm "Cristobal" will move northward over the central Gulf of Mexico today and tonight (LT), and will be near the northern Gulf of Mexico coast on Sunday, June 7, 2020. Its center is forecast to move inland across Louisiana late...

The unprecedented threat of desert locust to food security and livelihoods continues in the Horn of Africa and it is also very likely to spread to southwest Asia and perhaps West Africa, according to a situation update by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization...

Farmers in Northern Ireland are facing the worst drought since 1976. It came after an unusually dry spell and the sunniest spring ever, with records dating back to 1929. Allan Chambers, a member of the UFU's Seeds and Cereals Committee, said the lack of rainfall...

Russian President Vladimir Putin has declared a state of emergency in Norilsk, Siberia, on June 4, 2020, following a 20 000 tonne-oil spill in the Arctic Circle. The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) described the disaster as the second largest in modern Russian history...

Severe Cyclonic Storm "Nisarga" caused extensive damage and killed four people after it made historic landfall over Maharashtra on June 3, 2020. Meanwhile, the financial capital Mumbai was spared as the storm changed its course. The India Meteorological...

The hypoxic area or "dead zone"-- an area of reduced oxygen level which kills marine life-- in the Gulf of Mexico is forecast to be approximately 10 800 square km (6 700 square miles) larger than the long-term average of about 8 700 square km (5 400 square...

Severe thunderstorms ripped through parts of mid-Atlantic on Wednesday, June 3, 2020, leaving at least three people dead and more than half a million people without power. On Thursday morning, June 4, the National Weather Service (NWS) confirmed the event was a...

A strong earthquake registered by the USGS as M6.4 hit off the coast of Halmahera, Indonesia at 08:49 UTC (17:49 LT) on June 4, 2020. The agency is reporting a depth of 106.9 km (66 miles). EMSC is reporting M6.4 at a depth of 105 km (65 miles). The epicenter was...

Steamboat Geyser in Wyoming is the world's tallest active geyser, which sometimes blasts water over 90 m (300 feet) into the air. At times, the geyser stays quiet for years then abruptly bursts back to life-- a behavior that has been puzzling scientists. A new...

New activity/unrest was reported for 3 volcanoes from May 27 to June 2, 2020. During the same period, ongoing activity was reported for 13 volcanoes. New activity/unrest: Cleveland, Chuginadak Island (USA) | Ijen, Eastern Java (Indonesia) | Karymsky, Eastern...

Autumn 2020 in New South Wales, Australia, was the state's coldest and wettest since 2012, the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) confirmed in a seasonal climate summary issued on June 1, 2020. Daytime temperatures were below to very much below average for NSW, except...

Up to 86 714 lightning strikes were recorded in the entire Washington state, U.S., on Saturday, May 30, 2020-- about 62 percent of the state's yearly lightning average. It occurred during a severe weather event described by the National Weather Service (NWS) as...

A strong earthquake registered by the USGS as M6.8 hit Antofagasta, Chile at 07:35 UTC (03:35 UTC) on June 3, 2020. The agency is reporting a depth of 96 km (59 miles). EMSC is reporting M6.8 at a depth of 87 km (54 miles) The epicenter was located 48.2 km (29.9...

Severe Cyclonic Storm "Nisarga" made historic landfall over Maharashtra, India just south of Alibagh at 07:30 UTC on June 3, 2020, with maximum sustained wind speeds up to 110 km/h (70 mph) and gusts to 120 km/h (75 mph). The landfall process will be...

A devastating hailstorm lashed parts of northern Portugal on Sunday, May 31, 2020, causing more than 20 million dollars' worth of damage to this year's fruit harvest. Areas in the north, including around Viseu and Fundao, Castelo Branco, Belmonte, Covilha,...

"Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently -- they're not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can't do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do."